USA - President Barak Obama, as chief executive, probably holds the record for acts involving either failure to enforce laws, or acts encroaching on the powers of the other two branches

Abuse of Power in the Executive Branch

by Howard Kainz

In Civics 101, we learn about the venerable mainstay of democratic republics—the separation of government into Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches.  Properly employed, this separation should result in a beneficial “balance of power,” preventing usurpation of power by any particular branch.  Working as expected, the legislature makes the laws, the executive enforces them, and the judiciary interprets the laws, and decides whether they apply or not in specific cases.

The ideal of such separation dates back to principles laid down in Book XI, Chapter 6, of The Spirit of the Laws, by the French political philosopher Charles De Montesquieu (1689-1755), who pointed to the English constitution as the closest approximation at that time to the ideal. During the 18th century Enlightenment, this idea gained currency, leading the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to proclaim (over-optimistically) that with a constitution incorporating such a balance of powers, “the problem of establishing a state is solvable even for a nation of devils, if only they have intelligence!”

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